Settlement casserole

I, like most people who have followed international politics at all, have
been hearing for years about the issues surrounding the Palestinians and
the Israeli settlements. I'd still always made the assumption, though,
that there was some sort of distinction between the Palestinian territories
and the Israeli settlements such that one could actually draw some sort of
vague border.

More fool I.

Mother Jones printed a map of the actual settlement picture and the areas
of control in the Palestinian Territories, and then I found
similar maps with a quick Google search. This is ridiculous. I agree
with some of the sentiments of the person who put up this page -- I wonder
why these maps aren't shown every time this situation is covered.

The actual maps of the settlements make it painfully obvious that the
Israeli government and some portions of the population of Israel have tried
to do everything it could to prevent any sort of easy compromise situation
and to complicate the situation of these territories as much as they can.
(Note that they're not the only ones; as near as I can tell, many elements
among the Palestinians are trying to do exactly the same thing in different
ways.) The really depressing part is that it looks like it's rather
successful.

More fool I, as well. I'd presumed that it was messy to some extent, but
not nearly that much.

I think I now have a considerably greater understanding why in Civ III it's possible to declare war by building a settlement in someone else's territory. This seems to be a whole battle being largely fought that way.

Posted by Brooks Moses at 2003-11-03 13:01

Yeah, I've seen similar maps before. It's fairly clear, to me at least :),
that neither side is really keen on a compromise of any sort.

Michael Howard wrote a book, _War Since 1945_, that has a chapter on
Palestine and the settlements. It's been a while since I read it, but I
believe even in the 40s and 50s, militant Israelis were taking action to
create the situation we have today.

We won't ever see peace in the Middle East so long as there are significant
numbers of people (on both/either side) that are unwilling to compromise in
order to live together. Sometimes I wonder if the chance for this came and
went a long time ago.